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The Errand Boy

In this 1961 inside-Hollywood spoof, Jerry Lewis, as director and star, brings out the “id” in idiocy. He plays Morty Tashman, a messenger who becomes a corporate spy for the geriatric blunderers who are running Paramutual Pictures into the ground. In a string of painful yet funny set pieces, Lewis uncovers the grotesque realities of daily life in Hollywood and in the world at large—from sexual subjection in crowded elevators and the elegantly ritualized stupidity that passes for entertainment to the brazen arrogance of petty stars. Meanwhile, the browbeaten, humiliated, manipulated, lonesome Morty unintentionally wreaks havoc on every system, rule, institution, and production at hand and mocks the codes of celebrated movie genres. Lewis’s antics bring out his radically democratic politics: when the yearnings for power, self-expression, and love are thwarted, the ordinary man becomes the great anarch. Morty may not make a revolution, but he does make a mess.